IBM and MIT Say Materials and Quantum will Supercharge AI

IBM and MIT Bet That Materials and Quantum Advances Will Supercharge AI 
Technology Review

By Will Knight; Elizabeth Woyke

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and IBM have announced a project to probe new deep-learning approaches and devices, materials, and physical phenomena to advance artificial intelligence (AI), including quantum computing. The partners will establish a new research facility based at MIT for hardware innovations, as well as new types of machine-learning algorithms. The latter area of concentration will explore algorithms that could enable computers to gain knowledge from unlabeled data, as well as those that could make possible the transfer of learning from one domain to another. "We're not going to be designing algorithms that are completely independent of the architectures we're going to be using," says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's school of engineering. "We'll see system-level thinking." Chandrakasan also says the facility will investigate the practical application of AI in specific domains, including computer security and healthcare. ... "